The Five Best Games to Give (and Get) This Christmas

I keep reading how 2013 was such a great year for video games, but I just don’t believe it. The numbers and my own experience as a reviewer lead me to think this has been a fairly miserable and disappointing year, at least for console-game publishers and many gamers.

Cribbing from my colleague Ian Sherr’s recent story on November game sales, the industry picture is fairly dismal. Sales of games at retail stores dropped 24%, despite the release of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles.

While the overall picture is one of growth for this year and next year, the PwC forecasts of 4.2% in 2013 and 6.4% next year lag the rosy 28% growth in 2007, just after the Xbox 360 and PS3 were released. Console gaming is undergoing a transition, with physical discs sold in stores giving way to digital downloads. But even those are competing with 99-cent and $9.99 game apps new gamers are opting for over $400-$500 consoles and $60 games.

All that said, there were a few bright spots in gaming this year. I want to highlight the five games that I really liked and wouldn’t mind giving or getting in my Christmas stocking.

1. Grand Theft Auto V — Until this Rockstar Game came out in mid-September, industry sales figures lagged year-earlier numbers. When GTA V (for Xbox 360 and PS3) set a record by grossing over $1 billion in just three days, it was clear this game was almost singlehandedly going to save the sector in 2013.

The focus on money is highly appropriate, as this latest installment of the GTA franchise is all about greed and wealth, stealing and investing to maximize your haul.

GTA V is not only the best game in the series, it may also be the best game I’ve ever played. Seriously. It has bumped The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim to number two in my list of favorites. I reviewed it earlier and liked it a lot. But I’ve liked it more and more and played it for dozens of hours since then. It’s deep, engrossing, and while extremely over-the-top in terms of violence and profanity, it is a highly realistic-looking game with a very smart artificial intelligence.

For those who slept through the game’s launch, you’re one of three, main, playable characters – Michael, Franklin or Trevor — carrying out heists to make money along a complex storyline, but with ample time to explore the open world, do side missions or waste time playing tennis, going to a shooting range, club or shopping for clothes.

Missions are doled out in due time, so you don’t feel the time-compression you do in other games.

GTA V’s array of weapons and vehicles is staggeringly high, and its soundtrack is very broad, ranging from oldies to hip hop to music with a Latin beat. There are also motorcycles, helicopters and planes, each requiring different skills to learn how to operate.

The ability to invest in the game’s two stock markets – and even manipulate prices due to your own in-game actions – adds a layer of depth that I haven’t experienced in other games. I sometimes go onto the console just to play the stock market or buy income-earning property.

And just when you’ve completed everything, you’ll find the world of GTA isn’t done yet. The multiplayer GTA Online game mode launched shortly after GTA V went on sale. Yes, it was with some hiccups, but the way you can take the skills you’ve acquired offline and join or run a crew, plan or participate in online heists or races means you’ll not soon get tired of GTA. I wish I had a better Internet connection, but I like playing GTA Online as much as I do GTA V.

GTA V is one of the rare games out there worth the $59.99 price tag, and considering you also get to take your game online if you have the GTA V game disc or download, you’re investing in weeks and weeks of non-repetitive play.

2. Animal Crossing: New Leaf - At first blush, this game about nothing is not an obvious choice. But after dusting off my Nintendo 3DS XL and playing for several days as the mayor of Najville, I got addicted to the game. And I’m not alone.

New Leaf was a whale for the 3DS, spurring mucho sales and underscoring what Nintendo has been trying to convince consumers of for several years: That great game software can move serious amounts of hardware.

New Leaf is another extension of the Animal Crossing series best-known on the Nintendo consoles that hook up to your TV. This version translates very well to the 3DS, though I had to turn the 3D function way, way down because it was nauseating me. It feels a lot like a Wii game, with crisp animation and smooth-moving characters.

Life in New Leaf focuses on the mundane. You build something, you buy something, you watch fireworks, get bitten by a mosquito, visit your neighbors and do other day-to-day things anthropomorphic fuzzies do. The whole thing was also very childlike. Yet, I found myself checking in on my character several times a day, and thinking about checking in on him when I couldn’t. Not since I took over my young son’s Tamagotchi many years ago had I felt so addicted to a stupid game.

New Leaf costs $34.99, but you’ll have to have or shell out around 200 bucks for a 3DS or 3DS XL.

3. Forza Motorsport 5 – “Hey, beautiful! Where have you been all my life?” Yes, if any game was made for the newest generation of consoles, this one, from Turn 10 Studios and Microsoft, is it.

The Forza series is my favorite racing simulation, and Forza 4, this game’s predecessor, remains the best in the series, even after playing the new game. That’s because I have some quibbles with Forza 5’s in-game economy, features and gameplay, which I’ll cover in a minute.

But Forza 4 can’t hold a candle to the amazingly sharp and detailed graphics of this new Xbox One exclusive. I was so amazed at the game’s shadows and effects that I found myself taking multiple screenshots and recording bits of my races to play back and share.

The racing physics are highly accurate, and I found myself going white-knuckled into turns and corners of tracks in virtual Europe in all sorts of high-performance cars. The only thing missing from my Forza 5 experience, which came on the week the Xbox One launched, was a racing wheel. I have my eye on this one, which gets rave reviews, but at $400, you might want to buy a PS4 to sit next to your Xbox One, instead. The wheel supposedly provides amazing haptic feedback to add to the game’s realism.

The best part of Forza 5 is the Drivatar – a very smart variation on typical AI opponents. The game uses your habits and those of others playing the game to build virtual opponents with different tendencies. What it means is that Forza 5 has a more-sophisticated competition system than other simulators. Opponents are unpredictable, and you have to be much sharper during races than you ever did before.

My gripes were about the fact that – for the same price – Forza 4 had twice as many cars as Forza 5 and relatively little need to buy extra vehicles or bling during the game. I felt fairly gypped to find only 200 cars in Forza 5, and lots of pressure to conduct microtransactions to buy more. To be fair, I never played more than a few dozen cars in Forza 4, but I found the hardsell quite off-putting and the prices too high to better-equip yourself in Forza 5, especially after buying a season ticket and paying for the full game.

I wasn’t the only one thinking that way, and Microsoft bowed to pressure. It said last week it would change the in-game economy, lowering car prices and giving players more credit than before. That’s enough for me to give the nod to this $59.99 game as a 2013 stocking-stuffer. Forza 5 is the first real next-gen game to me, though it’s not without blemishes.

I wish Microsoft had waited a bit to release the game. It feels a bit rushed, and is missing some key things you’d expect from a realistic game, like changing in-game weather, for example.

4. The Last of Us – Between the Hunger Games, Will Smith movies and all the copycat books, movies and games, I’ve pretty much had it with virtual dystopia.

That is, until I played The Last of Us. Released in June, the Naughty Dog –developed game, published by Sony, sold nearly 3.5 million units in three weeks and was the best game out there until GTA V.

The Last of Us is a gritty, unpretentious game that features a trek across a post-apocalyptic U.S. in the near future. You’re Joel, escorting a young girl to a resistance group that believes the girl, Ellie, could have in her genes what’s needed to cure the illness that has killed most of the world off.

The storyline is interesting and challenging, the game is well-designed, the moral dilemmas the game presents you with really make you think about yourself in a way most mindless shooting games don’t. You have to make real choices between being loyal or not, sacrificing yourself and your needs for a greater good.

I was also intrigued to find my character having to use real time to build some of his weapons. In each case, I had to decide whether I wanted to find and use the resources and spend the time to, for example, build a Molotov cocktail to use against enemies while I was under attack, or to save time and just use what was at hand and hope it was enough to beat the zombie-like characters coming after me.

Gameplay this year is OK, a slight improvement over FIFA 13, and even on the new consoles, where graphics are much better, I wasn’t completely floored by the realism like I was with Forza 5.

What impresses me – and what gets FIFA 14 onto this list – is that EA is the first publisher to really think ahead about how to create a near-seamless experience between the Xbox 360/PS3 generation of consoles and the new Xbox One/PS4.

You can transfer all of your coins, trophies and cards from the old console to the new – and I guess it works in the other direction, too, if you want to do that. Changes you make to your Ultimate Team are reflected on both consoles. Unfortunately, you can’t play online games between the two consoles, just as an Xbox player can’t challenge a PS player online, but who knows? Maybe one day.

As a gamer, I appreciate how EA thinks about the total user experience and, through a combination of cloud technology, mobile apps and social media, created a tightly knit world where like-minded players can transact business, check scores and leaderboards, share accomplishments and store and move stats between consoles. It’s not everything I want, but it’s pretty close, and you get a lot more than just a game disc for your $59.99.